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Talk:Singapore
The picture was taken by me when I had the opportunity to vacation there. It really is a lovely city. At the time I thought I was just having a pleasant getaway, but I think it left a deeper impact. I find myself thinking of the few nights I spent there more and more the longer I'm away from Asia. (You'd think my mind would go back to Seoul--I actually lived there, whereas Singapore was just a quick break from the ratrace. But, no.) Turtle Fan 01:16, October 5, 2010 (UTC) :I wasn't that impressed by the city itself, but the mass transit system is great there.Barrel Nagurski 03:16, October 5, 2010 (UTC) ::The MRT/LRT ran smoothly and quickly. The different lines could have used a few more transfers. The cabs were wonderfully inexpensive an comfortable. I didn't ride the bus lines, though I was on a good number of tour buses which impressed. The airport's among the world's best, of course, and the ferry terminal was also pretty cool. (I took a side trip to Bintan, which was relaxing if unexciting.) Turtle Fan 10:09, October 5, 2010 (UTC) Singapore in Worldwar Hey I just thought of something. What was the fate of Singapore in Worldwar? Mr Nelg :By the map, Japan got it. TR 15:48, May 28, 2011 (UTC) :Two choices present themselves: It's ruled from Preffilo by way of Cairo, or it's ruled from Tokyo. I just checked the map in the front of my copy of SC. In the paperback it's too small for Singapore to show up at all. I then checked A, which I have as a hardcover. You can see a dot for Singapore there but you can't make out the color. ::You're right. I did not locate Singapore properly the first time, and it isn't big enough on the map to really say by the color. TR 06:36, May 29, 2011 (UTC) :::It usually doesn't show up on a world map unless it's labeled conspicuously. In fact, I couldn't locate it on a map till I decided to vacation there. Turtle Fan 18:07, May 29, 2011 (UTC) :Malaya is Lizard, the parts of Borneo which the Brits used to rule are Japanese. The former Dutch East Indies are Japanese. Singapore presumably got thrown in with one or the other, and whereas today it's more or less equally happy to associate with Malaysia or Indonesia, at the time of the Peace of Cairo it was much more closely aligned with Malaya. That speaks out in favor of it being a Lizard colony. :So does the fact that I've always been very skeptical about the SE Asian portion of that map; characters said over and over that Japan, like Britain, walked away from the table with its Home Islands but nothing else. ::In reviewing quickly StB via amazon, I find nothing that indicates this one way or another, actually. And we do learn in SC that Japan still has Midway, so there is textual evidence that Japan did hold onto more than just the Home Islands. :::Huh, on further review you're right. There's talk of the fact that the Brits don't get to keep any colonies except Northern Ireland, and talk of the fact that Japan is in the same position as Britain, but apparently the Lizards, like the people in charge of locating the Confederate sunbomb project, have never heard of transitive relation. (Considering that HT was clearly just mailing it in when he wrote TG, whereas StB shows every sign that he actually gave a shit about what he was writing, I find this a good deal more upsetting than the other.) :::I wonder why the Japanese got to keep so much of the stuff they seized in the winter of 1941-42. I guess I can understand the Dutch East Indies and Indochina, because the Netherlands was defunct and I seem to recall Petain having his arm twisted into handing over France's SE Asian colonies on the pretext that Vichy was the successor state of the Third Republic. (And obviously Free France wasn't going to be able to administer a colony of that size.) So if the Lizards didn't want those places (and we have identified a few reasons they might not, though these reasons do seem to go pretty firmly against their imperialist grain) and didn't want to bother with creating and supporting client states (and they often went back and forth on whether they were willing to do this), Japan's as good a beneficiary as any. But the Brits had a much stronger claim to Hong Kong and Sarawak and Sabah and Brunei than the Japanese did (though presumably Hong Kong would have regressed to the Lizards as the legally recognized rulers of China in 1997). Now I guess you could argue that Britain didn't have the ability to project power that far anymore. That's a thin enough rationale for giving Japan British colonies, but it has no appliation at all to the Philippines, and the fact that the Japs got to keep those just boggles the mind. Turtle Fan 18:07, May 29, 2011 (UTC) ::Nonetheless I take back what I said earlier. Now that I have correctly identified Singapore on the SC map, reviewed the history and the geography, and learned that a causeway over the Straits of Johor bridges Malaysia and Singapore (and was in place before the war), I can't think of a single reason why the Race wouldn't take Singapore. TR 06:36, May 29, 2011 (UTC) :::When the Brits decolonized SE Asia, the proposal was for all their colonies east of Thailand to become one nation-state. That would have made Singapore the capital of a Malaysia that also included Brunei. But the Singaporeans realized that they had nothing to gain from such a union and most of them were leery of having a Muslim monarch. So they became their own republic instead, but as you can well imagine from looking at a map they are deeply intertwined with Malaysia commercially. They do however have a law stipulating that your gas tank must be 75% full before driving across that causeway, thus sparing their gas stations from Malaysian competition. Turtle Fan 18:07, May 29, 2011 (UTC) :Yet the map gives them Hong Kong and pieces of SE Asia suggesting the region was divided more or less at random. The only explanation that makes sense is the Lizards knew they wouldn't do well in the tropics and didn't want to have to bother with those parts of SE Asia that would be very restive. Can you imagine them fighting the Vietnam War? :But even then, there's nothing restive about Singapore. Its Chinese majority would probably be in sympathy with anti-Lizard fighters in China (the KMT more likely than the CCP) and its sizable Indian minority would likewise probably be in sympathy with anti-Lizard fighters in India. (Presumably at the behest of this sizable Indian minority, Singapore is home to the only monument to an Axis unit I've ever come across in my travels, the Free India Army. Bizarrely, it's right smack dab in the middle of a whole slew of monuments to those who resisted and/or died in the brutal occupation of the city.) The much smaller Anglophone minority might resent the Lizards for Sydney and Melburne, but the city is too diverse for any kind of nationalism to take hold. Likewise, its politics are at the end of the day pragmatic rather than ideological, and given the Race's twin aversions to water and humidity a city built on a tropical island is not a place they're going to want to spend a lot of time. That--plus the fact that they are far too small geographically for an uprising to leave much of their territory intact even if it succeeds--leads me to make the educated guess that they're a fairly compliant Race colony whose good behavior is rewarded with a kind of benign neglect. Turtle Fan 15:52, May 28, 2011 (UTC) ::That makes sense. While their general lack of interest in water and humidity might give them pause, crossing the Straits of Johor would be much more practical than invading New Zealand, but there is no reason to think that they'd opt to micromanage the place. TR 06:36, May 29, 2011 (UTC) :::Given that both China and India are permanently in rebellion, and that prior to the arrival of the Colonization Fleet each soldier killed was irreplaceable even without the legal complication of whether they could extend the Soldiers' Time, I think any Asian colony willing to accept benign neglect in exchange for good behavior could probably get away with anything short of pursuing an independent foreign policy and the Lizards would be grateful and relieved. Turtle Fan 18:07, May 29, 2011 (UTC)